Thread by @adamfelber

Just finished reading the Simpson/Fusion GPS testimony. Some thoughts:

The pee tape is real! THREAD

First, treat anybody’s early tweets about it with caution. There’s some decent info out there, but a lot of people are rushing to tweet first and think later.

Okay, first: it’s clear why Republicans didn’t want this released. Simpson is credible. Steele is a “boy scout,” and the pee tape is real!*

*maybe

Big takeaways:

The FBI already had a source inside the Trump campaign, a whistleblower.

Russia was deep into Trump’s campaign, though we knew that.

Something deeply fucked up was going on at the FBI in October, 2016.

That last bit is important. Maybe it’s just because they had no idea how to handle this stuff without looking like they had their thumb on the election.

Maybe they just assumed /hoped Trump would lose, and then they could just arrest people at their leisure.

Maybe there were warring factions inside the bureau, factions that were keeping info from each other for investigatory or political reasons.

That last one is disturbing, but it seems like a real possibility. Bottom line, the FBI was flailing around. Possibly because there is absolutely no road map for this kind of shit.

Anyway, here are some truths:

This Simpson guy’s entire career depends on producing real information. “Opposition research” is a tricky term, but info is useless to guys like him if it isn’t true.

As he says about 9 hours into the interview, if he discovers that Trump is a great, honest businessman, it’s his job to report that. It’s info that’s valuable, even to an “opposition” client.

(Note: That is not what he discovered.)

But he does mostly document stuff. So when the document trail led to Russia and dried up, he reached out to one of his favorite “human intel” guys. Steele.

Steele, like Simpson, only succeeds by producing real info. In Steele’s case, that means being good at not being fooled by disinformation.

Steele is very good at that. It’s what he does.

So, Simpson’s question to Steele was “What the hell did Trump do when he went to Russia?”

The answers disturbed them both enough that they felt obligated to go to the FBI.

Simpson describes it as “like, you know, when you’re driving to work and you see something happen and you call 911, right.”

Right.

Anyway, it’s not like even Steele would say everything in his so-called “dossier” is 100% accurate. But it’s definitely not “phony.”

In fact, it’s not a dossier: it’s stuff he was sending to Simpson - stuff he thought was credible - as he was learning it.

So here’s my thought: if you’re an expert on seeing through Russian disinformation, are you likely to fall for a super lurid, outlandish claim? I mean something that really, really looks like a defamatory lie?

Are you going to just accept something salacious and silly that seems - even to a layman- specifically engineered to bring down a powerful man by embarrassing him?

No. No you are not.

Not unless you have reason to believe that the outlandish, obvious lie is in fact true.

The pee tape is real.